Our trip to Florence, Italy!

We were in Italy this past week for a few days. We flew to from Frankfurt to Pisa and then took an hour train to Florence. Florence was simply beautiful. I tried to capture our trip and the city through my photos. Let me show you what we saw!

All over the city were lilies. Yes, Fleur de Lis is their emblem. They were everywhere!

The first morning in Florence I woke up to this. Ariana fell out of her bed in the middle of the night so we let her sleep with us. Awww what a way to wake up!

Then it was off to explore the city. 

I made up a scavenger hunt for Rich for his birthday. Amazing Race style! He was checking the map to find his first clue! It was so much fun!

The sinks had foot petals instead of knobs.

A view down one of the streets, Italian flags everywhere!

We found this big beautiful magical carrousel!

There were some truly unique buildings!

This golden pig that is a mascot for Florence.

One of his clues was to find vespas in the colors of the Italian flag! He suceeded!

This is the Santa Maria Novella. It was right down from our hotel and we often stopped here to relax, let Ariana run around, eat Gelato, and watch the people.

It's also were I wrote most of my postcards to my pen pals! I was happily surprised at the great response I received!

Gelato is to die for! And it comes in the best flavors! Chocolate covered cookies and wine anyone!? Yum!!

The city has statues everywhere!

The Piazza della Signoria has many statues and even has a replica of David by Michelangelo.

This is NOT the real David, but it's the closest we got. The line for the museum where the real David is housed was 4 lines, each line stretching around buildings and in the blazing hot sun. We opted to skip that museum. This guy was were the David originally stood until he was moved into the museum for safe keeping.

David was sculpted by Michelangelo from 1501-1504.

Us in the Piazza della Signoria (see the David replica behind us)

Ariana tried her hardest to twirl her pasta like us.

Pinocchio was everywhere since the story is an Italian one.

We enjoyed strolling through the the Museo Galileo (a science museum). Outside on the sidewalk leading to the front door were the zodiac signs. If you're up for something gross, they have some of Galileo's fingers on display. Yup, eww.

Rich and I are Gemini and Leo!

Statues of Da Vinci and Michelangelo along with other famous artists. Both of these artists hail from Florence.

Grabbing a snack at a fruit stand. 

We celebrated his birthday! WHooooHOOO!!!

He enjoyed Steak Florentine, Beef Carpaccio and of course a yummy birthday dessert. I surpsied him by whipping a candle and lighter out of my purse and lighting it right as they placed the plate in front of him! Ha! 

You can see more of the pizza and pastas we enjoyed here! 

Lots of restaurants displayed their steak meat in the store windows like this.

The city definitely had a lot of character. Here are some of my favorite city scenes and tidbits. 

We went to see the Santa Maria de Fiore. It's dome was the largest in the world until St. Peter's Basilica in The Vatican was built!

The outside is made of green, red and white marble.

The floors inside the cathedral are ornate.

And so is the art inside the dome.

We checked out the oldest bridge in Florence. The Ponte Vecchio which literally means Old Bridge and seems to have been built before 996, no, that's not a typo! During WWII all the other bridges in Florence were destroyed except this one. Hilter gave orders to save it. History is amazing!

More strolling around finding random buildings and churches. 

The Jewish Synagogue. 

After a few days in Florence, we took a train back to Pisa. Unfortunately we weren't able to spend any good amount of time exploring Pisa because of our time restraints but we did get a quick glimpse of the Leaning Tower!

Can you find it in the photo taken from our plane???

Need help? It's in the top right section. This is zoomed in...

The tower is actually a free standing bell tower of a church! I only just found that out when researching for our trip!

I admit I've got the travel bug.

We've only been back home for a few days but I'm dying to plan another trip. It probably won't happen anytime soon though. There's SO MUCH we want to see before we have more kids and before our time here is up. It'll be gone in a blink of any eye and we know it! I'm going to enjoy as much as I can while we have the chance. We're so blessed to have this opportunity! I'm glad I can share my experiences with y'all and hope I'm not making you hate reading my blog with all my travel updates. :)

I'm working on making a video of our Scavenger Hunt (if I can pull it off) so that will be something exciting to share soon!

xo's

Cat